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Facebook Snatches Up FriendFeed

by Terrence O'Brien on August 10, 2009 at 04:50 PM

Facebook Snatches Up FriendFeedFacebook, not content to simply crush its direct competitors (e.g., MySpace), has snatched up social-network aggregator FriendFeed. FriendFeed gathers your blogs, your Twitter posts, your Flickr photos, your Delicious bookmarks, your Netflix queue -- pretty much anything you can think of -- and puts them all in one place for your friends to read, comment on, and share.

The acquisition of FriendFeed was just announced on the Facebook blog, which made clear that all FriendFeed employees would be retained and moved over to Facebook, while the four founders would become senior members of the Facebook engineering and product teams.

Details other than that were slim. FriendFeed will continue to function as it has for now, and Facebook has revealed no details in how it plans to utilize the new property. We expect, however, that Facebook will use some of the core technologies to improve its news feed, with improved filtering and easier sharing. We also wouldn't be shocked if Facebook put more of an emphasis on pulling information from a user's other social networking accounts. Currently, you can put information from Twitter, Delicious, and others on your Facebook pages, but the apps are clumsy. Simply using FriendFeed to power a new Facebook homepage would make integration much more seamless, and give people less of a reason to stray to other sites.

User reaction on FriendFeed has been decidedly negative so far, but what can you expect? Remember the first time your heard Arcade Fire being played over the P.A. in Best Buy? Well, this is kind of like that. [From: Facebook, FriendFeed]

Tags: acquisition, business, facebook, friendfeed, money, social networking, SocialNetworking, top

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